Release: Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5

Yesterday was the release day of Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5. The first backup solution with full support for vSphere 5.1 and Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V 3.0.

An overview of the new features can be found in the this Youtube video:

I think the following features and enhancements are worth an upgrade. If you’re running a vSphere shop.

Features:

Restore from SAN snapshots
Version 6.5 also introduces Veeam Explorer for SAN Snapshots, which provides granular VMware recovery from HP StoreVirtual VSA and LeftHand snapshots. Codeveloped with HP, Explorer for SAN Snapshots lets you perform Veeam restores (Instant VM Recovery, Instant File-Level Recovery and Explorer for Exchange item
recovery) of VMware VMs directly from array-based snapshots.

You can find a short demo over here:

Reminder: Although SAN snapshots can provide excellent RPOs (recovery point objectives) for certain operational disasters, they cannot serve as real backups since they would be lost along with production data in the event of a storage disaster. Thus, you should never rely solely on SAN snapshots for data protection. To ensure protection against all types of disasters, continue to perform regular backup of all VMs to backup storage using Veeam backup jobs or VeeamZIP™.

Direct file restore. When restoring a guest file back to its original location from the backup console
(Backup Browser), perform the restore with a single click. You no longer need to supply destination
information, and Veeam Backup & Replication does not have to stage the file locally on a backup server
or on a network share.

Dynamic disks. Extended support for file-level restores from dynamic disks to include spanned,
striped, mirrored and RAID-5 volumes.

Backup Browser UI. Updated the Backup Browser’s user interface (UI) to match the new product UI
introduced in version 6.1. Removed the hidden system partition from the volume tree. Now retrieves
actual drive letters from restored guest OS settings (rather than simply assigning in sequential order).